hunch

What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the… Read More

Welcome to Startup Sherpa, a new show we are piloting on TechCrunch TV. Rather than have one of us at TechCrunch interview subjects, we thought we’d try something different. Startup Sherpa is more a conversation between founders that we get to listen in on. Super angel investor (Founder Collective) and Hunch founder Chris Dixon is our host, and in each episode he will be talking to… Read More

Gift giving can be so hard, especially if you have a bunch of hipster friends who turn their noses at anything even slightly pedestrian. (“A box of See’s Candy that you bought at the airport? Are you kidding me?”). Well, fear not. All you need to do is make them take this little Etsy Taste Test on the commerce site for hand-crafted goods. After selecting a series of… Read More

Right about now, a lot of us are scratching our heads about what to give people for the holidays. Well, if the person you are looking for uses Twitter a lot, try Hunch’s new Gift-O-Matic. You just plug in their Twitter handle, and Hunch spits out a list of gift suggestions. The Gift-O-Matic is just something a couple Hunch employees threw together to show off the Hunch API (which… Read More

Well, I guess all I had to do was ask. After my mopey post Monday I got flooded with questions for Chris Dixon, and the nature of the questions has taken a decidedly “Dear Abby” spin. Dozens of you asked for Dixon’s advice on specific problems, but at the same time problems that many entrepreneurs face. Questions ranged from the tactical– how to use online marketing to… Read More

Recommendation engine Hunch is rolling out partnerships with seven large sites to provide personalized recommendations for their products, services, or content. Interactive Corp’s Gifts.com, Bluefly, Buzzfeed, Heyzap, ShopStyle, Milo and FanBridge are the initial partners, and Hunch says more will be announced shortly.
“These companies will either build applications that reside… Read More

Recommendation engine Hunch usually asks you a few questions and can then help you decide things like whether or not you’ll be happy with a porsche. Or they can look at data another way, and show that TechCrunch readers tend to be optimists, for example.
But sometimes Hunch likes to show off a little and prove that they know you even before you answer those questions. Their Twitter game… Read More

Recommendation site Hunch has been going through a reboot lately. Back in June, it stopped showing results to people who are not signed in, and earlier this month it redesigned its home page to offer personalized taste recommendations across a wide variety of categories such as dog breeds, U.S. national parks, camcorders, soft drinks, luggage, and film directors.
Now it is testing out… Read More

Decision site Hunch is making a big change today which co-founder Caterina Fake predicts will cut traffic in half, at least, but improve the overall experience for those who remain. The site will no longer be open to users who don’t log in, although you can log in with your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Hunch helps people make decisions by taking new users through a long series of… Read More

When it comes to social sites on the Internet, Dogster and Catster have to be doing something right — they’ve been profitable for the past three years. But that doesn’t mean they should just sit back and not tweak the sites at all to offer a better user experience, and they know it. That’s why both sites have undergone a complete refresh. In what CEO Ted Rheingold… Read More

Venture capital is flowing once again to startups at a steady pace. During the first quarter of 2010, the total value of venture funding doubled to $12.8 billion from $6 billion a year before, when it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, the funding amount is down 16 percent from the $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, based on an analysis of CrunchBase data.
Some of… Read More

The problem with having more than a million followers on Twitter, or even more than 1,000, is that you don’t really know who they are. But Hunch thinks it knows a lot about the followers of at least popular Twitter users. It is now pulling together detailed psychographic profiles of those followers with a new Twitter Followers tool.
For instance, Hunch suggests that if you follow… Read More

New York based Hunch is on a bit of a roll. Users have now answered 50 millions questions on the service, which uses your answers to help give you recommendations for just about anything. Investors have taken note of their progress, and they recently closed a $12 million venture round from Khosla Ventures and previous investors.
I sat down with cofounder Caterina Fake last week to talk about… Read More

When I first read about Hunch’s Twitter Predictor game, I was pretty skeptical. The game asks you to put in your Twitter user name and based on who you follow and who you are followed by, it predicts how you will answer questions on Hunch. Then I used it. It’s awesome. Well, pretty awesome.
Out of 35 questions I answer, Hunch correctly predicted by my answer to 32 of them and was… Read More

Recommendation engine Hunch confirms that they’ve raised a new round of financing – $12 million – led by Khosla Ventures. Partner Gideon Yu, who joined Khosla Ventures last year, was previously the CFO of Facebook. He is now joining Hunch’s board of directors as part of the deal. Hunch was valued at $52 million in the round.
I spoke to cofounder Caterina Fake this… Read More

Sometimes it takes a while for a site to find its legs. Hunch, which launched last March to much fanfare, is only now in the past few months capturing the attention of consumers. As the comScore chart above shows, Hunch recently hit a growth spurt, jumping from an estimated 130,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, 2009 to 371,000 in November, 2009. While the overall size of the audience… Read More

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is joining decision-making engine Hunch’s board of directors and will serve as an advisor to the startup. Hunch was recently launched by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake as a platform to help users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics.
To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted… Read More

When you want an answer to a question, you want it now, which is why the social Q&A service Aardvark first launched as an IM client, then via Facebook, then Twitter. Only today is it opening up its Website as a general social search engine. And it’s just a much better interface than the command-line-reminiscent prompts in the IM interface.
You still have to sign in or sign up for… Read More

One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark… Read More

In search, nobody wants to go up against Google. Even Microsoft is trying to position Bing as a “decision engine” even though it is really just a search engine. But Hunch, a startup which launched publicly today, is an actual decision engine. The only thing it attempts to do is help you make a decision through a question-and-answer interface.
Hunch is part of a recent flowering… Read More